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With weddings, graduation parties and summer festivals canceled, postponed or curtailed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, food trucks across town are shifting gears to navigate this new, event-less, normal.

Like many of their counterparts in the hard-hit restaurant industry, some food truck operators are experimenting with new business models to sustain themselves through what would normally be their busiest season.

“I’m fully prepared to not have any events this year,” said Detroit BBQ Company owner Tim Idzikowski. “Until there’s a reliable vaccine for this, I wouldn’t personally feel safe doing a big event.”

Detroit BBQ Co. owner Tim Idzikowski inspects a tray of mac 'n' cheese at the food truck's commissary kitchen in Ferndale on May 7, 2020. In response to a summer of canceled events due to COVID-19, Detroit BBQ Company has begun serving curbside carryout out of the commissary on 8 Mile.(Photo: Mark Kurlyandchik, Detroit Free Press)

Idzikowski’s popular truck is a staple at summer festivals like Ferndale’s Pig & Whiskey, where lines for Detroit BBQ’s smoked brisket, ribs and massive turkey legs often snake around the municipal lot where it's parked. In previous years, the July festival has drawn tens of thousands of mid-summer revelers, but the city recently announced it was canceling all of its summer festivals for 2020.

Now, Idzikowski and his four employees have pivoted to focus on curbside carryout right out of the commissary kitchen space they lease on the Ferndale-Detroit border.

And though April sales were down more than 50% from last year, Detroit BBQ’s new way of doing business has been enough to cover the bills, even if the owner has had to forego drawing a paycheck himself.

“It's more important for me to take care of my people,” Idzikowski said.

Slabs of ribs turn in the industrial smoker at the Detroit BBQ Company food truck's commisary kitchen in Ferndale on May 7, 2020. In response to a summer of canceled events due to COVID-19, Detroit BBQ Company is serving curbside carryout out of its commissary on 8 Mile.(Photo: Mark Kurlyandchik, Detroit Free Press)

He’d considered partnering with third-party delivery services like GrubHub and UberEats during the winter doldrums, but their cut — typically around 30% — was too much to swallow, and the drivers could be inconsistent. Instead, he realized he could pay $20 to boost a Facebook ad promoting the curbside carryout and reach 10,000 people with every post.

“From having never done carryout eight weeks ago to doing almost $6,000 in carryout last week, that’s not bad,” Idzikowski said. “Every week we see the growth in sales.”

The new system is simple: Wednesday through Sunday Detroit BBQ begins taking call-in orders for the day at 3 p.m. Pickups run from 4 to 7 p.m. Customers pull up out front on 8 Mile or in the empty lot next door, call the restaurant to let them know they’re there and then wait in their cars while the food is brought out. There’s a staff member dedicated to taking payments either via cash or contactless chip reader who changes gloves after every transaction.

Detroit BBQ Company's menu is posted daily on Facebook and often features deals like the classic chicken and rib combo, which includes a whole chicken and a slab of St. Louis-style ribs along with a hefty tray of mac ‘n’ cheese, cornbread and another side like slaw, beans or sweet potato mash — all for just $30. Enough food to feed a family of four, it’s a great deal even before you consider that everything is scratch-made. Nothing comes from a can.

In response to a summer of canceled events due to COVID-19, the crew of the popular Detroit BBQ Company food truck is instead serving curbside carryout out of its commissary kitchen in Ferndale.(Photo: Mark Kurlyandchik, Detroit Free Press)

And though the food truck sits mostly idle for now, Idzikowski believes he’ll be in a better position than many of his brick-and-mortar restaurant counterparts once more of the economy begins reopening.

“Offices are going to come back first and I think food trucks will be really great for that because there still won’t be dine-in restaurants at least for the first few months that offices are open,” he said. “I think that will give a really good boost to whatever food trucks are still open.”

'I'm really lucky'

While even a mothballed restaurant still has rent to pay and other fixed costs, the overhead for food trucks is much lower, allowing those that decide to sit out the season to come back quickly once events pick back up.

“The good part about food trucks, a lot of the ones that have been around for a few years are completely owned free and clear and aren’t financed in any way,” Idzikowski said.

That fact has been a lifesaver for Hassan Musselmani, the operator of the Drunken Rooster truck, a common fixture of the downtown food truck scene around Campus Martius, serving tacos with a Mediterranean twist to hungry office lunch crowds.

“I’m really lucky I paid off my loan on my food truck last year, otherwise it would’ve been another $1,000 a month I would’ve had to pay,” said Musselmani.

A former contestant on Fox’s “Hell’s Kitchen,” Musselmani is already calling 2020 a wash for the Drunken Rooster. At the moment, he's coasting on savings and recently filed for unemployment.

Detroit BBQ Co. owner Tim Idzikowski inspects a tray of mac 'n' cheese at the food truck's commissary kitchen in Ferndale on May 7, 2020. In response to a summer of canceled events due to COVID-19, Detroit BBQ Company has begun serving curbside carryout out of the commissary on 8 Mile. Mark Kurlyandchik, Detroit Free Press

Slabs of ribs turn in the industrial smoker at the Detroit BBQ Company food truck's commisary kitchen in Ferndale on May 7, 2020. In response to a summer of canceled events due to COVID-19, Detroit BBQ Company is serving curbside carryout out of its commissary on 8 Mile. Mark Kurlyandchik, Detroit Free Press

Marc and Kevin Kellman and their Brother Truckers food truck on May 8, 2020. The two brothers have started going around to different neighborhoods selling their food to residents. They were set up in this White Lake neighborhood waiting on customers. Kirthmon F. Dozier, Detroit Free Press

Detroit BBQ Company employee Danielle Lopez prepares an order for curbside carryout at the popular food truck's commissary kitchen in Ferndale on May 7, 2020. In response to a summer of canceled events due to COVID-19, the Detroit BBQ Company is serving carryout out of its commissary on 8 Mile. Mark Kurlyandchik, Detroit Free Press

In response to a summer of canceled events due to COVID-19, the crew of the popular Detroit BBQ Company food truck is instead serving curbside carryout out of its commissary kitchen in Ferndale. Mark Kurlyandchik, Detroit Free Press

Nick Wilson, co-owner of The Lobster Food Truck, poses for a photo while set up in the parking lot of the Home Depot in Troy on May 7, 2020. To survive a summer without events -- the lifeblood of food trucks -- The Lobster Truck sets up for drive-through service in parking lots across metro Detroit. Mark Kurlyandchik, Detroit Free Press

Nick Wilson, co-owner of The Lobster Food Truck, takes a customer's payment in the parking lot of the Home Depot in Troy on May 7, 2020. To survive a summer without events -- the lifeblood of food trucks -- The Lobster Truck sets up for drive-through service in parking lots across metro Detroit. Mark Kurlyandchik, Detroit Free Press

The drive-through line at the Lobster Food Truck in the parking lot of the Home Depot in Troy on May 7, 2020. To survive a summer without events -- the lifeblood of food trucks -- The Lobster Truck sets up for drive-through service in parking lots across metro Detroit. Mark Kurlyandchik, Detroit Free Press

Two lobster rolls from The Lobster Food Truck on May 7, 2020. To survive a summer without events -- the lifeblood of food trucks -- The Lobster Truck sets up for drive-through service in parking lots across metro Detroit. Mark Kurlyandchik, Detroit Free Press

“We’re getting crushed, man,” he said. “My whole business is based off of events of 100 or more people. Every food truck that’s been open for more than a year and a half needs to do $1,000 an event. And to get $1,000 you have to feed 80 to 100 people. Some people think people will feel comfortable coming out after this is all over and there’s going to be a huge party. I just don’t think that. I’m just planning for the worst and to not make even 20 grand with my food truck this year.”

Still, he’s gearing up to follow a similar path as Idzikowski in the near term. In the winter offseason, Musselmani works as a paraprofessional at Center Line’s Rising Stars Academy, teaching culinary skills to young adults with disabilities. The school is also his commissary kitchen, and he’s planning to begin offering prepared meals for carryout at the site.

“I hate to sound like a pessimist about it, but I just say the whole year of 2020 is done for my food truck, basically,” he said. “There are still options. There’s catering. People are selling pre-packaged meals that the family heats up at home. I’m probably going to do that as this moves on toward the summer."

A silver lining

Despite the brutal setback COVID-19 has posed in their third year of business, things are beginning to look up for the Brother Truckers food truck run by Marc and Kevin Kellman.

“We were almost fully booked for the season by the middle of February,” Kevin Kellman said. "And then this hit and … we had lost all of March immediately, including Opening Day, which could’ve been a $2,000 day. We saw what was happening and were like, ‘Oh my God, what are we going to do?’”

The answer: If the people can’t come to you, you go to the people.

On March 25, with the blessing of the neighborhood's homeowners association, Brother Truckers posted up inside Kellman’s own West Bloomfield subdivision.

“We’d talked about doing this subdivision tour thing when we first started because we didn’t know if we’d get events,” Kellman said. “We didn’t know how it was going to work. How did we get permission? Who would come out? And then suddenly we had no other option. We were getting feedback from people to do it like an ice cream truck. But you can’t just drive around frying up mac ‘n’ cheese bites and flipping burgers.”

It just so happened that March 25 was the kind of blue-skied early spring day that brings cooped up Michiganders outside, pandemic or not. It was also just two days after Gov. Gretchen Whitmer issued her first stay-at-home executive order.

“We were slammed,” Kellman said. “It was incredible. And literally within two days there was like 108 messages saying, ‘Come to my sub; do this here.’ And from there, I haven’t had to call one other person. Everyone has just started calling me. Now we’re booked.”

Brother Truckers, known for their burgers, fried mac ‘n’ cheese bites and scratch-made sloppy joes — based on the Kellmans’ grandmother’s recipe — are now doing rotating neighborhood visits every Thursday and Friday. Kellman said they’re booked through June and may scale up to four or five days a week by July if cases don't spike again.

“And people have been so thankful and so appreciative,” Kellman said, adding that it goes both ways. “Even in a subdivision where there’s probably 200 houses, we only do maybe 30 of those houses. But if those houses have four people living in them, that’s 120 tickets. That’s huge for us.”

Like the others, Kellman thinks that the food trucks that can make it through this tough time stand to benefit in the long run.

“I think that food trucks will actually do better than restaurants if they can survive this onslaught,” he said. “It’s not going to go back to normal anytime soon, but once things start to get back to some sort of normalcy, I think food trucks will be even more in demand because you’re not congregating inside a restaurant. There’s less people handling the food. I think it’s actually going to be better for us.”

'A big hit for us'

Either way, COVID-19 has fundamentally changed the Brother Truckers business. Kellman said the neighborhood stops will now be a permanent fixture, particularly in the slower off-season.

And while this new approach has been successful, the numbers currently don’t come close to adding up to a typical events-driven model.

“For a month like April, we would have over 20 events in that month and we would average close to $1,000 an event, not to mention whatever catering,” he said. “So just that month alone we probably would’ve done $20,000-plus. Where we only did $8,000 at most in April. So it’s a big hit for us. This month, it’s probably even worse because May is a huge month — a $25,000 month. And we’ll probably only do eight to 10 grand. It’s paying our bills. But if our wives didn’t have jobs where they were still getting paid, I really don’t know what we would’ve done.”

That’s the situation Gabe Cervantes has found himself in, too. It’s hard enough to be operating a business that requires person-to-person contact during a pandemic. But it’s even harder to be just starting one, as has been the case with Cervantes and his El Cazo food trailer.

Back in November, Cervantes took a leap of faith, leaving his cushy office job in the financial services sector to pursue his dream of one day opening a restaurant. His plan was to start with a food truck serving his own twists on Mexican street food.

“I started building this trailer out from November to right around February,” Cervantes said. “I had booked a lot of big events. I’m ready to launch and — boom! — the country shuts down.”

So he called up his old grade-school buddy, Eric Lakeman, the fifth-generation owner of Abick’s Bar in southwest Detroit and asked if he could set his trailer up on the backyard patio until things blew over. He’d already been doing pop-ups there while he was building the trailer. And it was his old neighborhood, with a built-in audience of old friends and family.

“The first week was pretty scary in a way,” Cervantes said. “It was slow. But at the end of the week I did have a good, positive day. We sold out of food. I had a few sellout days. It’s getting steadier and steadier. It’s been surprising, the fact that we’re making it work. It’s not what my business plan was, but it’s more than I expected to be doing here.”

Cervantes is looking at this time as an opportunity, a long soft-opening phase that will allow him to market-test and tweak recipes while smoothing out operations. So when events return, he’ll be ready for them.

“If we’re into July and people can’t have big graduation parties and stuff like that, it’s going to hurt,” he said. “I’ve got some reserves, but it will run out. I don’t have a ton of overhead, but I do have some debt and three kids at home as well. My wife works, but if crowds can’t get together by July that’s going to be pretty scary.”

Cautious optimism

Southwest Detroit has long been home to many successful food trucks, even before the trend swept through Michigan in the wake of the 2008 recession. One prime example is the decade-old El Parian, which now includes three outposts that sling carne asada and al pastor tacos popular with families and the landscapers and construction crews who live and work nearby.

And though business is down roughly 30%, co-owner Nancy Lopez remains cautiously optimistic.

“According to other businesses, compared to sit-down restaurants, we’re doing good,” she said. “Our business is enough to cover our bills and employees. Our profit margin is not where we’d like it to be. But my employees — I have to sacrifice us in order for them to stick around.”

Lopez said the biggest change she’s mulling is raising prices. With the price of chuck roast tripling and warnings of impending meat shortages, she sees few alternatives. And that’s worrying.

“I’m afraid to raise them,” she said of the prices. “We’re not in a situation where the economy is high and people are working and can pay that. We have a mentality that $1.50 or $1.75 is not that expensive, but once you say $2 per taco, it’s like, ‘Wait a minute.’ And even explaining to customers that once prices go back down so will ours, it’s still kind of a hard decision.”

Lopez considers herself and her businesses lucky, especially when she looks around at the restaurants that have long made Southwest Detroit a destination for Mexican and Central American cuisines.

“Even though they’re our competition and everything, it’s really our whole community,” she said. “If I’m doing good, I want them to do good. It’s sad to see the change that’s going on in restaurants.”

She’s not unscathed by the fallout restaurants have faced, either. Lopez and her husband/business partner, Ramon Diaz, were all set to finally unveil their renovated brick-and-mortar restaurant, La Palapa del Parian, at 1633 Lawndale the week before Gov. Whitmer’s order banned on-premise dining in the state. Instead, they re-opened softly in early May for carryout only.

“It’s sad,” Lopez said. “All our investment has been in there. The renovations we did. It kinda hurts. You want people to be sitting at your tables and enjoying your food and now you don’t even get to see that reaction.

“Something so beautiful and it’s locked up in a box.”

On the move

But it’s not all doom and gloom and scraping to get by, at least not for Detroit native Nick Wilson and The Lobster Food Truck that he runs with his aunt and business partner Katherine Wilson.

Nick Wilson, co-owner of The Lobster Food Truck, takes a customer's payment in the parking lot of the Home Depot in Troy on May 7, 2020. To survive a summer without events -- the lifeblood of food trucks -- The Lobster Truck sets up for drive-through service in parking lots across metro Detroit.(Photo: Mark Kurlyandchik, Detroit Free Press)

Ever since Katherine convinced her nephew to return from Miami where he was working in fine dining to run a food truck together, they’ve done things a little differently.

Instead of shutting down for the winter, the Wilsons kept the truck going in the offseason by posting up in businesses’ parking lots around town and slinging warm, butter-soaked lobster rolls and fried lobster bites via drive-through service.

“When the coronavirus hit, I decided to close down for a week to see what was going to happen to the government and how things were going to play out,” Nick Wilson said. “And then when we reopened, we saw many, many cars come. A lot more than we’ve ever had before.”

Remarkably, Wilson said sales have doubled from last year.

“Because people are tired of eating food in their house, tired of cooking,” Wilson posited. “And I think because we have a unique product that you can’t really get anywhere else.”

The Lobster Food Truck moves around quite a bit: Wednesdays it's in Detroit, Thursdays in Troy, Fridays in Dearborn and Saturdays in Southfield or Farmington Hills. No matter where it is, the lines follow.

“As far as I know, when I started the drive-through in 2018, no one was doing it,” Wilson said. “They were calling me crazy because it was snowing outside but I was still open.”

But in this new upside-down world of social distancing, contactless payments and carryout only, what would’ve once been considered crazy now seems to make the most sense.

The drive-through line at the Lobster Food Truck in the parking lot of the Home Depot in Troy on May 7, 2020. To survive a summer without events -- the lifeblood of food trucks -- The Lobster Truck sets up for drive-through service in parking lots across metro Detroit.(Photo: Mark Kurlyandchik, Detroit Free Press)

“It’s always worth it at the end of the day,” Wilson said, “if you’re able to provide food to people they can’t get anywhere else. That brings smiles.”